To
summarize the story, Bonhoeffer is a somewhat-famous German Lutheran
minister involved in several assassination plots against Adolf Hitler.
He was from a family of patriotic Germans who disliked Hitler and the
Nazis almost from the moment they came onto the scene. This, of course,
shows a level of prescience that was sorely lacking in all too many
others of the time -- both among Germans and the whole world over.

The
various members of the family dealt with the odious regime in different
ways. As they were something of an aristocratic family, they were
unfortunately drawn into rather close proximity with much that went on
at high levels.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer initially dealt
with events by remaining a forthright annunciator of the contemporary
Protestant position wherever the Nazi movement intersected with the
church. He denounced cooperation with Nazi activities aimed at bringing
the church into the Nazi program and perverting its doctrine. He
brought about a split in the German church which fractured along this
line. He also made certain that foreign powers had an accurate idea of
events within Germany by serving as a contact with influential members
of foreign churches. In all of these actions, he brought unwanted light
to bear on Nazi activities and caused them a great deal of
embarrassment. He was a tremendous and highly respected thorn in their
side.

Then comes a turning point -- he is drafted into
the Nazi army. He decides to flee service, not wishing to cooperate,
and secures passage to the US. But this decision does not sit well with
him as he sees himself fleeing his problems and his troubled nation and
church in its time of need.

So...he goes back...and joins the Military Intelligence!

From
here, he leads a double-life of intrigue, joining a conspiracy to
assassinate Hitler, blah, blah, blah...fails several times, gets jailed
and eventually executed.

***

It
may seem rather profoundly morally idiotic to question the decision to
assassinate Adolf Hitler in this day and age, especially given the
benefit of hindsight – something not available to Bonhoeffer – not to
mention that he died in the attempt. In my defense, I am not trying to
say that the guy is not a hero, and certainly that I believe he was a
brave and upstanding man. My question is more philosophical, and I ask
the reader to compare Bonhoeffer's actions and attitudes with another
famous theologian who wrestled with similar problems – C. S. Lewis.

I
hope I might be forgiven for continually bringing up Lewis, however, he
is the only such thinker for which I feel I am familiar enough that I
can really speak intelligently about him. I can't speak on his behalf,
but from my reading of him he seems to have had a very profound and
acute sense for exactly where his 'business' began and ended, including
his moral obligations, and that he observed them rather absolutely.
This makes him come off as a rather 'standoffish-libertarianish' soul in
a way that I think many people who claim to find his writings endearing
simply do not understand because they haven't read him well enough.
I'm not so sure that they would like him quite as much if they did know.

Consider,
for example, his service in WWI. One night he observed that the German
defensive positions were not very well secured, and that a night-time
raid might be particularly effective against them. He reported this to
his officer, who replied something along the lines of “Well, yes, we
could do that. But if we did, the Germans might get the idea that they
should maybe try something similar, and then where would we be?
Fighting eachother all day long, and now all night long, too. Why don't
we just leave well-enough alone, and each be a little bit less
miserable?”

Lewis seems to have found this an excellent
suggestion, and honorably served out the rest of the war without
experiencing any more 'pangs of heroism.' Now, this may not seem quite
the same as Bonhoeffer's position, and surely it isn't. After all,
Lewis was asked to serve on the 'good side,' and could do as he was told
in good conscience. But Lewis also knew full well that such 'lack of
initiative' could very well prolong the war, and perhaps even more,
since as yet the outcome of the war hadn't been decided. How could
being such a 'moral slacker' in itself be moral?

Simply
because, I think, Lewis had a very different understanding of his own
moral obligations. He did not operate at the same 'moral specific heat'
as one like Bonhoeffer. In fact, I think he would have recoiled at the
idea that such a weight was upon his shoulders at all, as Bonhoeffer
appears to have felt. That would not have set well with his
understanding of God, His creation, and his expectations of man, I
think. One can find evidence of this 'stand-offishness' very
consistently throughout his writings, almost regardless of topic.

His contemporary and friend J.R.R. Tolkien expressed similar sentiments:

What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand. Pity and Mercy: not to strike without need.I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve
death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them?
Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing
for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

'Very
well,' he answered aloud, lowering his sword. 'But still I am afraid.
And yet, as you see, I will not touch the creature. For now that I see
him, I do pity him.

Again, not an exact
parallel. Hitler was hardly a Gollum (to most people's understanding,
anyway...) and the situations are different. But the argument does turn
on what exactly it is one's business to be up to – and both
'self-elected final arbiter of justice' and the argument from 'eventual
ends' are specifically excluded.

***

Speaking
of which, would Bonhoeffer's 'ends' have realistically been achieved by
such actions? I cannot help but think that this is a naïve perspective
-- that had the conspirators succeeded in their assassination attempt,
all would have been well, more or less. Somehow, I doubt that their
optimistic expectations would have been realized. There seems to be a
sort of romantic notion of 'heroes of history' somehow deflecting
history from its course, averting mass horrific events and with acts of
dash and daring or self-sacrifice. As if the Nazis hadn't been
popularly elected, did not have widespread support, no intrinsic
sympathy for their propaganda and programs for society existed, and
Hitler did all the bad stuff himself. Do they really think that if they
had deposed the leader, the 'sheep' would have dispersed?

Or
perhaps the attitude is not quite that straightforward. Perhaps it is
more a rather severe and dramatic sense of personal responsibility – in
keeping with the sense of urgent moral interventionism.

I
can't help but think that perhaps this attitude of urgent moral
interventionism is/was actually a part of the problem. Hitler, after
all, was a man of and for the volk. If any government was ever
activist and interventionist, his was. Despite its horrific outcomes,
the whole totalitarian movement was originally motivated by intense
instincts of compassionate intervention – for the 'common man' – into
every corner of life. It attained power by appealing to this apparently
very widespread instinct in the populace.

Why is it
that so many modern leaders seem to have this feeling that they need to
do so much for everyone else – even when they are elected explicitly on
promises that they won't! Was it always this way? Is it really mostly
because they are craven manipulators and conspirators? Maybe
sometimes, yes. Maybe most of the time.

But
politicians are almost of necessity incurable 'people persons' –
especially the type that tends to get elected nowadays. One almost has
to be to go through the rigmarole and to get the votes. How many of
them actually have gone off to govern with the right intentions, only to
be swept away by their sympathies when it came down to actually making
the choice?

But it is not as if these people are space
aliens – 'they' are 'us.' In other words, its not just them, its almost
everybody else, too. I think it is embedded in the modern way of
thinking. Most 'good' people can't help but be 'motherly' about
everyone and everything – liberal and conservative alike. They see this
as doing what is right. Probably the most telling observation of how
deeply this idea is embedded can be seen in popular Christian notions of
God – everything 'according to His plan,' even the death and suffering
of the innocent. Yes, God planned for innocent little children to starve
to death. It's actually all for the best, if we could only
understand; it has to be.

No, that position is not theologically elementary and obvious. But it is very common.

If
you saw evil, and had the power to act, would you decline? Could you
stay your hand, 'on principle,' especially when surrounded by others who
will condemn you for it? If you could, what percentage of your fellows
do you think could?

There is, at least, some dignity
in being violently oppressed by a thuggish, manly dictator. But to be
coddled to death by people intent on being overbearing nursemaids and
finger-waggers? The Cubans at least get to smoke.

Bonhoeffer
was adamantly opposed to the Nazis, fought them bravely, and is a hero
for it. But I can't help but thinking that the very attitudes which
animated him, which he shared with so many of his fellows, which are
almost universal today, and which caused me to be rather repulsed by
this book, are not precisely the kinds of attitudes which set the stage
for groups like the Nazis to attain power in the first place.

Hence, I think perhaps, the modern popularity of Mr. Bonhoeffer.

***

A
lot of people probably wonder why I tend to post odd things that seem
to have little to do with – or sometimes seem at odds with – the theme
of Liberty's Torch.The reason is thoughts like these. With all the bad things one sees going on, what is a guy really to do?

Not vain fantasies of somehow showing the bad guys what for, king-for-a-day castle-building, &amp;c. What if pretty much everybody is a bad guy, the whole world is evil? How do you solve that?

How
can I posit answers to these things – call others to arms, even – if I
don't even know what is going on? I may not like the direction the ship
is sailing, but do I know where to take it? Not just which general
direction it should go, but an actual, real course and destination?
What should I be willing to do to get it there? That is the job of a
captain. Further, is it my place to wrest the helm away from others, or
realistic to think that I could? Or is it only given to me to mind my
own affairs, and to take care of the things which have legitimately
fallen to me as best I can?

Isn't the whole problem
that so many people aren't doing just that? Or have even I fallen into
this same thinking, and inadvertently created a false analogy – there is
no 'big ship,' only a fleet of little ones, and by default, whether I
like it or not, I stand at the helm of my own little dinghy? If so,
perhaps there is really nothing else to do than remain indifferent to
what the cruisers and tankers are up to. Perhaps Captain Bonhoeffer was
deluded, and was never the mutineer aboard the USS Nazi Germany that he
thought he was, but only imagined himself to be and was plowed under
and drowned before his time because he refused to mind her wake and
steer his little john-boat clear of her. Perhaps he shared the very
delusions of the crew whose efforts he set out to torpedo.

I
don't think that ideology is enough. I'm beginning to think it is
positively bad – part of the problem. Ideology is pretend certainty,
and if I know anything it's that I'm not certain. I've spent a lot of
time with free-market economics – well, more than most people, anyway.
I've read the views of many experts, and I can find holes. There is no
concrete 'answer' there, only abstraction and insight and suggestion.
These are wonderful things – perhaps more important than the answers
themselves – but brass-tacks in the physical here-and-now they are not.
The brass-tacks are concrete things – actual laws, customs, traditions,
attitudes.

Of these, I find that I cannot say so
easily what should be and what should not. I can see them in the light
of the abstraction, but they are of two different worlds, and can never
bear directly on one another – only indirectly, through our own eyes and
thoughts and minds. It seems that maybe many such systems could fit
under the umbrella of 'free' more or less well, but that they can't all
necessarily fit there together, nor necessarily persist there for long.
'And yet, it moves.' Reality bears upon reality, tomorrow is never
today which is never yesterday. Neither history nor society are state-functions, to be held in idyllic motionlessness, except in the dreams of the central planners and hardened ideologues.

What is my place?
It seems a question more central to the world of medieval hierarchy
than to modern politics, especially of the libertarian variety. In
fact, it seems almost irrelevant today, and maybe that's a shame. As
for me, I'm not entirely sure how to answer it, but in lieu of positive
certainty, I've settled on a more modest goal – developing ideas, as
opposed to fighting battles. As to the concrete, I shall try to hew to
the path of the muddlers like Lewis.

Your questions call to mind the description of government's place in Glory Road - basically, to do nothing because "this, too, shall pass" and to do something big usually creates unintended consequences.

It's always a hard thing to decide what's OK to do. Harder, the more deeply you think. The key for me, is always to "zoom out" (to use a useful AutoCAD term) or to back up and look at the bigger picture, then move back in.

To my mind, reading Scott's essay, it strikes me that he imagines what Lewis or Bonhoeffer or maybe even you or I or he should have or could have known the effects of our resistance before the fact.

That is, imagine yourself in 1934 or 1936 Germany. What do you do? Shoot Hitler? Get a bunch of friends to stand up to the Brown Shirts? Go with the flow?

No. It seems obvious to me that none of those will happen. Nobody else did those things and if you did them, you would jut fall under the wheels before they did.

But more to his point, is there a zeitgeist that makes Hitler his way, and you yours? Or is it possible to have a singular mind that understands the flow of things and, "thus oppose them?"

Jesus, Europe had just gone through the 1st WORLD WAR and it threw everything out of kilter. Monarchies, national boundaries, the money system . . . EVERYTHING was out of whack. We screwed around in the U.S. for over a decade, but it eventually got to us. In Europe, and particularly Germany, Russia and Austria and the Balkins, the ramifications hit much sooner.

It was chaos and an overturning of the natural order such as none of us alive has ever seen.

In his essay, Scott reasonably asks, "How can I posit answers to these things – call others to arms, even – if I don't even know what is going on? I may not like the direction the ship is sailing, but do I know where to take it? Not just which general direction it should go, but an actual, real course and destination?"

And then he says the thing that got me hyped up enough to write this probably meaningless diatribe: "I don't think that ideology is enough. I'm beginning to think it is positively bad – part of the problem. Ideology is pretend certainty, and if I know anything it's that I'm not certain."

I'm not certain, either. But ideology is not "pretend certainty." Ideology is what you fall back on when your innate beliefs may not be enough to answer a particular question.

This doesn't refute Scott's basic idea that maybe a "meddling nature" led to Hitler's and everyone else's idea that we should be "doing something about things."

But I *do* believe that "moral question" that C.S. Lewis and Bonhoeffer had to answer for themselves is a *personal* question, not really a metaphysical or *deep meaning* one.

If someone is taking advantage of someone else, what do you do?

1) You defy them, knowing you can beat them;

2) You defy them, without any assurance you will prevail;

3) You acquiesce and STFU.

There really is no uber question of meddling or not. SOONER OR LATER, it will come down to "right or wrong." And yeah, that's subjective, but what isn't?

Now, my argumentative thingy: Get over the Baby-Boomer-as-godless-mindless-stupid-obese-detructor-of-everything-that-was-good-before-then meme!

We didn't invent Social Security. Most of us didn't vote or provide input to the idea of Medicare.

But that makes no difference!

Our society is doing exactly what Germany's (pre and post Bismarck) did. We are evolving and trying to figure out how best to deal with what is going on.

Granted, union bosses held too much power for awhile; granted, manufacturers held too much power for awhile; granted, if government can dole out percs and money then elections will be corrupted by businesses and unions and individuals giving money to get politicians elected that favor them.

A) Does this surprise you?B) Do you really think the people on YOUR side AREN'T sucking on this teat?

There is a problem with the Bill Maher-Rachel Maddow-Arron Sorkin ("the Newsroom") vision of Conservatives. They believe we are animated by singular motives they can attack.

Thus, we must be "fundamentalist Christians." Or we must be unwilling to compromise. Or we must be wed to a Constitution we don't *really* understand. Or we must want guns, guns, guns. Or we must want to shackle women (somehow.) Or we must believe that color matters, (somehow.) Or we must think personal liberty is somehow a thing that a government should oversee.

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE IDEAS is a liberal idea that is projected on Conservatives.

I'm sorry, Scott. You cannot POSSIBLY find a defining principle in how Bonhoeffer or C.S. Lewis or Tolkien or Mises or Reagan or Madison or Thomas Paine finally decided that enough tyranny was enough.

No, I don't, anyway. He said I was a navel-gazer, and I responded in an appropriately shallow and self-absorbed manner. Some people aren't so much into the whole faddish vocabulary thing. But if you are impressed with it, by all means...

@furball:

I know you're just spouting, and don't really intend to put words into my mouth. Hopefully, some other response or thing I write will address some of what you say. But I agree -- I'm not really second guessing actions so much here, but mostly attitudes. I was second guessing his attitudes long before I go to the part where he came back to Germany because I found them positively annoying. We all have to make up our minds for ourselves, but beliefs have consequences, as they say. I still think he is a hero, but that his strained sense of personal-responsibility-for-everything got the better of his prudence.

Ideology is a philosophical error. It is the attempt to 'concretize the abstract.' Abstract principles are perfectly fine (and I suspect that these are actually the things you are falling back on, not ideology itself), it's how we go about manifesting them in concrete terms where the rubber hits the road. Ideology is using a sledgehammer to play the piano as far as that goes. When you want your principles seen through -- in no less than an absolute and literal fashion -- to the very end, no matter the cost of things as trifling as human life, etc, you have become an ideologue. On the other hand, if you are in a hard place, and don't know what to do, and fall back on the abstract principles you have come to know and respect, even and especially when it seems to run against your self-interest, then you are a good man.

Anyway, that's what I think, because I think using the word ideologue any other way doesn't make very much sense. Who isn't guided by abstract principles? It's when they're all you've got that it becomes a problem. Life is more complex than a geometry problem -- you can't possibly capture all of the dynamics with a few abstract principles. When you're lopping arms and heads off because, well, they're 'outside the lines,' you've become a monster.

As far as I am concerned, thought about how government should be (i.e. 'it's place') is more or less vain. Government will be what it will be, as its nature will more or less be a function of the nature of the people who constitute it, their stated preferences or opinion more or less irrelevant to the matter. It is rather silly to conceive of a government which is in any substantial way in opposition to the nature of its people over the long term.

To discuss the ideal nature of government is really to discuss something else indirectly -- how people should be, or how they are. Which is why I haven't discussed politics or government all that much for about the last year or so, and have instead focused on people. It doesn't really seem to me anymore that there is much purpose to complaining about it. What one is actually talking about is the changing nature of people and its consequences. One will not find the solution in 'the rules' or 'policy' or 'politics' or any such thing. That would be to look in the wrong place.

Voegelin says that the order of a society is an extension of, or 'representative' of, how that society views the order of Heaven. That goes pretty much for everybody, whether you are a Marxist, a libertarian, a medieval peasant, or a Pharonic Egyptian. You will conceive of the universe and the relations within it -- and its relations to 'the other' -- in a certain way, and you will order your thoughts and affairs accordingly. That is not to say that all these points of view are all equally correct; it is to say that this is what they all do. In a sense, everyone is a Utopian.

So, if you think that God rules the world, is an incessant, benevolent meddler, who 'makes' things turn out right for everyone, but somehow also respects free-will, you'll probably be a neocon or a 'liberal,' depending on the quirks of your other beliefs. It shouldn't surprise anyone that once you are in office, you act in the way you conceive 'right authority' to act, and that your supporters expect you to act that way. If you are quite sure that He is perfectly just and rules the world accordingly, or at least that 'the rules of the game' are fair and outcomes just, you will spout things that sound like Social Darwinism, that the rich and poor alike deserve what they get, etc.

On the other hand, if you think that authority over Earth has actually passed over to Satan for the nonce, you might have a very different perspective on things. I think that if you investigate, you will find that the theology of libertarian Christians is often quite markedly different from the theology of run-of-the-mill (i.e., conservative or liberal) Christians. Which, incidentally, is probably why the libertarian movement tends to be well-stocked with atheists; their experience of Christianity has come from their encounters of the much more populous variety.

At least, that is my experience, and anyway, I'm running on at the keyboard, and not necessarily in response to what you actually said. You get the idea, and why. When Leonidas chides me for my 'excessive introspection,' in a way he has hit his mark. That is what I am doing, because I am quite sure that that is where my answer lies. I must ask and answer 'what nature' to cultivate. 'What to do' is an infinitely more important question to answer than all the whining and complaining about how bad the government is -- which, if I am correct, is in itself possibly some of the most shallow navel-gazing of all!

What to be and what to do is the question, I think the former a bit more than the latter. And 'zooming out' certainly does help -- in a way, it's the point I'm trying to make! What would a whole world of Dietrich Bonhoeffers look like? You have to respect the guy, but probably remarkably like the one we've landed ourselves in. Maybe even worse!

"What to be and what to do is the question, I think the former a bit more than the latter"

I'd have to agree with this entirely. If you can't decide what to be, how can you possibly choose correctly what to do. Let Leonidas chide us as he will. ;-)

I'd never thought of it before as rulers ruling as they perceive just authority to rule with the Creator as their model. I rather suspect you're giving many of them too much credit. I believe that most of them rule in a way that gratifies them personally. Bur there I go whining about government.

I think your approach with people is the correct one. I'll try to emulate it... but government will almost certainly still annoy me.